When tragedies happen at schools — whether at Sandy Hook, Columbine or Virginia Tech — it is hard to imagine how students find the courage to go back to sites that are filled with so much trauma and pain. But in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, going to class is a powerful political act of defiance.
The name Ayotzinapa, a town in Mexico’s southern Guerrero state, has become shorthand for disappearances. On September 26, 2014, in the nearby city of Iguala, 43 of the school’s students were arrested by police and have not been seen since then.
The 43 students were trying to commandeer buses to travel to Mexico City for a protest to mark the killing of unarmed students in 1968. At least six people are known to have been killed in the Ayotzinapa incident last year.
But that’s not preventing some young men from joining the school. “Not anybody can go through what we have gone through”, Mario, a first-year student at Ayotzinapa, told me. He enrolled at the school two months after the events of September 26. For young men like Mario, born to rural families with very few economic resources, a school like Ayotzinapa provides not only education but also three meals a day and a place to sleep. It provides them with the only opportunity of a higher education and a chance in life.
The school is part of an ambitious educational project set up in the 1920s, after the Mexican revolution, which sought to provide young men of marginalised rural backgrounds with specialised education. The idea was to combine academic subjects with practical knowledge on how to take care of the land, and to encourage social activism.
But since then, successive conservative Mexican governments saw these schools as factories of trouble and relentlessly targeted them.
Over the years, the schools’ budgets have been increasingly slashed. Out of the 26 schools that were originally opened across the country, only 17 survive — and barely. And in 2011, two students died after clashing with federal and local police during a protest in a road near Ayotzinapa. The students were demanding an increase in the school’s budget. The police claims they did not attack them, but the tragic event was never satisfactorily investigated.
Mario had been convinced to join the school by two friends, who were among the 43 who were forcibly disappeared: Saul Bruno Garcia and Leonel Castro Abarca, two second-year students.
Today they are remembered in a memorial located in the shabby open-air basketball court of the school, where 43 orange chairs — one for every disappeared student — stand perfectly aligned. A picture sits on each one of the chairs, decorated by poignant letters, orange flowers and gifts.
Parents scared out of their wits
Mario’s decision to make the three-hour journey from his hometown to settle here after their disappearance was not an easy one. His mother was scared. So too were other students, some of whom have not returned to class since the tragedy, too afraid.
“When I learnt that Saul and Leonel were missing, I could not believe it. Just a day earlier I was exchanging messages with them. My mother was scared after what happened but I told her ‘if you don’t take a chance, you don’t win,’ so I came here,” Mario said.
Local campaigners say the recent disappearance of the 43 students has been a cruel attempt to stop their vocal activism, to send a message that there’s no room for them in today’s Mexico. “We never received a lot of support from the government, but now we receive even less. It is as if we are a rock in the government’s shoe,” Mario said. “We are working to get more resources to study properly, with dignity. All I want is to be a teacher, to teach and to help my family.”
Like no other human rights tragedy in recent years, the Ayotzinapa disappearances struck a chord in Mexico — a country where thousands have disappeared in the past decade and mass graves are discovered so frequently they barely make front page news.
“The worst is seeing the parents when they visit. We see them sitting in the chairs their children used to use,” said Mario. “I see them talking to the pictures, telling them that they will never stop looking for them. It was not the first time the government attacked us, but it was the hardest one. But we will not stop until we find the 43, until the government tells us where they are.”
The unshakeable courage of the students and families in Ayotzinapa are testing the indifference of the Mexican government to the core. The mood has changed in this country and there is now, at least, hope that the steely facade of the authorities may yet crack.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Josefina Salomon is a journalist working at Amnesty International´s Regional Office in Mexico City
